# EchoMask: Speech-Queried Attention-based Mask Modeling for Holistic Co-Speech Motion Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.09209 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09209/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [MaskGIT: Masked Generative Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04200/) (2022)
- [SoundStream: An End-to-End Neural Audio Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03312/) (2021)
- [Muse: Text-To-Image Generation via Masked Generative Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00704/) (2023)
- [AudioLM: a Language Modeling Approach to Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03143/) (2022)
- [AI Choreographer: Music Conditioned 3D Dance Generation with AIST++](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08779/) (2021)
- [MoMask: Generative Masked Modeling of 3D Human Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00063/) (2023)
- [FaceFormer: Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05329/) (2021)
- [Few-shot Image Generation via Cross-domain Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06820/) (2021)
- [Speech Gesture Generation from the Trimodal Context of Text, Audio, and Speaker Identity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.02119/) (2020)
- [Learning Individual Styles of Conversational Gesture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04160/) (2019)
- [Listen, Denoise, Action! Audio-Driven Motion Synthesis with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09707/) (2022)
- [CodeTalker: Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation with Discrete Motion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02379/) (2023)
- [Generating Holistic 3D Human Motion from Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04420/) (2022)
- [BEAT: A Large-Scale Semantic and Emotional Multi-Modal Dataset for Conversational Gestures Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05297/) (2022)
- [GestureDiffuCLIP: Gesture Diffusion Model with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14613/) (2023)
- [MMM: Generative Masked Motion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03596/) (2023)
- [Taming Diffusion Models for Audio-Driven Co-Speech Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09119/) (2023)
- [What to Hide from Your Students: Attention-Guided Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12719/) (2022)
- [Audio2Gestures: Generating Diverse Gestures from Speech Audio with Conditional Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06720/) (2021)
- [Learning Hierarchical Cross-Modal Association for Co-Speech Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13161/) (2022)
- [MineGAN: effective knowledge transfer from GANs to target domains with few images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05270/) (2019)
- [EMAGE: Towards Unified Holistic Co-Speech Gesture Generation via Expressive Masked Audio Gesture Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00374/) (2023)
- [Learning Speech-driven 3D Conversational Gestures from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06837/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [ContextFlow: Training-Free Video Object Editing via Adaptive Context Enrichment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17818/) (2025)
- [Mitigating Error Accumulation in Co-Speech Motion Generation via Global Rotation Diffusion and Multi-Level Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10076/) (2025)
- [MACE-Dance: Motion-Appearance Cascaded Experts for Music-Driven Dance Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18181/) (2025)
- [PersonaGesture: Single-Reference Co-Speech Gesture Personalization for Unseen Speakers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06064/) (2026)
- [Unison: Harmonizing Motion, Speech, and Sound for Human-Centric Audio-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08729/) (2026)
- [Not Just What's There: Enabling CLIP to Comprehend Negated Visual Descriptions Without Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21035/) (2026)
- [MultiMotion: Multi Subject Video Motion Transfer via Video Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07500/) (2025)
- [TokenDance: Token-to-Token Music-to-Dance Generation with Bidirectional Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27314/) (2026)
- [OmniDance: Multimodal Driven Dance Video Generation with Large-scale Internet Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30019/) (2026)
- [RoboGesture: Real-Time Semantic-aligned Co-Speech Gestures Generation for Humanoid Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.28693/) (2026)
- [BiTDiff: Fine-Grained 3D Conducting Motion Generation via BiMamba-Transformer Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04395/) (2026)
- [SmoothSync: Dual-Stream Diffusion Transformers for Jitter-Robust Beat-Synchronized Gesture Generation from Quantized Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04236/) (2026)
- [ReactMotion: Generating Reactive Listener Motions from Speaker Utterance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15083/) (2026)
- [PersonaGest: Personalized Co-Speech Gesture Generation with Semantic-Guided Hierarchical Motion Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07252/) (2026)
- [Interactive Multi-Turn Retrieval for Health Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01409/) (2026)
- [StreamTalk: Streaming Co-Speech Gesture Generation with Key-Pose Anchoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01643/) (2026)
- [AnyTalk: Speech Animation for Arbitrary Characters Leveraging a Video Generation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.16143/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Masked modeling has shown promise in co-speech gesture generation. However, it struggles to identify semantically significant frames for effective motion masking. In this work, we propose a speech-queried attention-based mask modeling framework for holistic co-speech gesture generation. Our key insight is to leverage motion-aligned speech features to guide the masked motion modeling process, selectively masking rhythm-related and semantically expressive motion frames. Specifically, we first propose a motion-audio alignment module (MAM) to construct a latent motion-audio joint space. In this space, both low-level and high-level speech features are projected, enabling motion-aligned speech representation using learnable speech queries. Then, a speech-queried attention mechanism (SQA) is introduced to compute frame-level attention scores through interactions between motion keys and speech queries, guiding selective masking toward motion frames with high attention scores. Finally, the motion-aligned speech features are also injected into the generation network to facilitate co-speech motion generation. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations confirm that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches, successfully producing high-quality co-speech motion.